Murder in Jerusalem (8 page)

“I want to make something perfectly clear,” the director general said. “Violence such as this has no place—”

“There hasn't been any violence yet,” Danny Benizri corrected him, fingering the top button on the sky-blue shirt he had slipped into just before going on the air.

“Benizri is totally out of line,” Niva said in the newsroom. “What do you call
that
?” she said pointing at the Channel Two monitor, which was showing smoke billowing from the tunnel. “What's that, if not violence?”

She pinned her eyes on Arye Rubin, who was standing next to Zadik, watching the monitor. Finally he nodded in agreement.

“Hefetz,” Niva said, “Tell Dalit to get Nehemia to shut Benizri up. He can't say that's not violence.”

Hefetz snapped his fingers at Tzippi, the assistant producer. “Come here,” he said. “Go downstairs and check what's with that VTR Niva brought from the archives, see if they've even gotten it ready. Ask Dalit.” He resumed watching the monitor.

On the screen appeared the three participants in this spontaneous interview: the director general of the Finance Ministry; Danny Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs; and the host, Nehemia, a veteran newsman famous for his evenhandedness, his formal manners, and the special brand of boredom he cast over his viewers. It appeared as though Nehemia had lost control for a moment; Danny Benizri was staring the director general down with sparks in his eyes.

“Ex
cuse
me,” the latter was saying as he fingered the edges of his tie, “I am very sorry, but—”

Judging by the actions of the host—Nehemia was touching his earlobe, behind which was located a transmitter that was providing him with instructions from the control room—it appeared that he was indeed being told to rein in the correspondent. “Danny,” he said, “Danny. Please, I must to ask you to…just—”

But Danny Benizri ignored Nehemia completely. He leaned toward the director general and asked, quietly, “Tell me, please, sir, what alternatives do they have?”

The thick, pale eyebrows of the director general rose halfway up his forehead, giving his round face a look of shock and wonder. “Mr. Benizri,” he said, straining to maintain his composure, “are you aware of what you are implying, that it is indeed an acceptable way to get what they want? We're talking here about people who earned large sums of money from shift work, and some of them live in luxurious villas—”

“Gentlemen!” the host cried, though neither man paid him any attention.

“What?!” Benizri said, shocked. “What are you saying? Maybe they're actually millionaires!”

Nehemia touched his earlobe again, and his brows furrowed until a deep crease formed between them. “Uh…Danny, please,” he said, waving his hand at the control room on the other side of a glass partition that could not be seen on-screen. He cast a pleading look toward the director and the producer and the rest of the staff sitting in the control room, but they could do nothing to rescue him. It was an unplanned live broadcast, and he had been unable to take charge of his guests, who were arguing as if completely oblivious to his existence.

“I can only discuss the facts,” said the director general as he pored over the pages spread out on the table in front of him.

Nehemia leaned over the pages, inspecting them like someone who had been taught it was forbidden for a participant—and certainly the host himself—to appear as though he were not actively engaged in what was taking place. But there was something pathetic about the way he feigned interest in the pages on the table when in the background Benizri could be heard demanding to know, “What luxurious villas?”

The director general laid his hand on the pages. “There are workers who earned more than 30,000 shekels a month during the weeks they worked shifts—”

“You are purposely misleading the public!” Danny Benizri shouted, and cast a look of reproach at Nehemia. “He is misleading the public, not a single one of them is rich,” he said emphatically, “and not a single one of them earns the kind of money he's talking about. There was only one such worker, his name was Baruch Hasson, and even in his case it was just one month, three and a half years ago, when there was a big order from Greece—”

A sudden commotion broke out in the control room, and the producer waved her arms and called on Nehemia to take charge of the discussion. Nehemia cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, touched his ear as a way of drawing strength and authority from the transmitter and from the producer's voice, and interrupted the director general. “These difficult events remind us of the tragic case of Hannah Cohen,” he said, turning to Danny Benizri. “In your opinion, can matters deteriorate as dramatically in this case as they did then?”

Benizri, too, glanced sideways toward the glass partition. “If you ask me,” he answered slowly, emphasizing every word, “mismanagement by the police could once again bring about tragic—”

The Finance Ministry's director general shifted in his seat and waved his hands. “Ex
cuse
me, I am terribly sorry,” he insisted, “but when a small group of individuals decides to take the law into its own hands, the police have no choice but to—”

“They don't have any choice either!” Danny Benizri shouted.

In the newsroom, all eyes were on the monitor. “Whoa, has Benizri totally flipped out?” Elmaliah the cameraman asked, his mouth full. He laid the rest of his sandwich on the edge of the table and said, “What's he arguing like that for?”

A look of absolute loathing on the face of the director general shone through the television monitor. “Excuse me,” he sputtered angrily at Benizri, “with all due respect, you are the correspondent for labor and social affairs, are you not? Not a spokesman for the workers. It seems to me you are meant to remain neutral, don't you think?”

Danny Benizri started to say something but Nehemia, after touching the transmitter once again, laid his hand on the reporter's arm. “Just a moment, sir,” he said to the director general, and to Danny he said, “Danny, please, I'm asking you…let's watch for one moment a documentary film you made about Hulit one year ago, for Arye Rubin's program
The Justice of the Sting
…”

But the director general refused to remain silent. He pointed an accusing finger at Danny Benizri and exclaimed, “This is outrageous, sir, simply outrageous the way you are speaking to me here!”

Salvation came from the control room, where the director cut into the discussion to run the film showing events that had taken place at the Hulit bottle factory one year earlier. Before Nehemia had a chance to say a word or announce the transition, on the screen there appeared a woman on a roof, shouting. Only someone who had been completely attuned to the program would have known that this was not taking place live.

Utter silence fell on the newsroom, until Hefetz went to the telephone, dialed, and said into the mouthpiece, “Pass me to Dalit.” A moment later his shouts could be heard everywhere: “Why are there no captions? People will think this is happening now! I want him to announce again that this is footage from the archives! Take care of it, you hear me?” He turned to Niva, his face red with anger, and shouted at her. “See? You wanted a woman to be news editor?! Screwup after screwup! Am I the one screwing up here? No! Did you see who's screwing up? Did you or did you not?!”

But Niva remained unflappable. She smiled slightly and said, “Oh, yeah? And a man would have pulled it off better?”

In the meantime, Hannah Cohen could be seen and heard on the factory roof; at the bottom of the screen ran the caption, FROM OUR ARCHIVES, an overlay to an earlier caption: HANNAH COHEN, HULIT BOTTLE FACTORY, SOUTHERN ISRAEL. “Every morning for six months I've been coming to his office like a dog, I say, ‘Pay us our wages, this isn't charity, it's for the work we've done,' and he, he says, ‘Come back tomorrow, come back tomorrow.' Well, that's it, there are no more tomorrows! They sit in their villas, they drive Volvos, and we don't have food for our kids. No more tomorrows—what am I supposed to give my kids to eat?” People could be seen at the foot of the building, gazing up at the roof. Next, the screen showed policemen knocking at the door to the roof and threatening to break it down if the protesters tried to block it with their bodies, until finally the policemen did break the door down and the protesters were pushed backward. Some were shouting, “Don't you dare come closer,” and others were hollering, “We'll burn down the factory,” and in the ensuing tumult Hannah Cohen could be seen being shoved backward with the rest of the protesters, trying to maintain her balance as two policemen pressed toward her; in the next frame she was shown falling from the roof.

“Sir, would you like to comment on what we have just seen here?” Nehemia asked the Finance Ministry's director general, whose eyes were downcast.

There was silence in the newsroom for a moment until Elmaliah the cameraman, who was standing next to the water dispenser pouring sugar into a Styrofoam cup of coffee, said, “What are they showing this stuff now for? Always trying to stir up a scandal!”

“What do you want?” Niva said. “I think it's actually good that they're showing it!” She glanced at the large clock on the wall, stuck her hand into her black leather bag, and thrashed around inside it, without looking, until she succeeded in fishing out her mobile phone. “Mother,” she chided after a quick automatic dial, “why didn't you call me? When did you get home?”

“As if it's going to have some effect on someone,” Tzippi said from her post in the doorway. “No one gives a damn.”

“So don't go out anymore,” Niva chastised her mother loudly, “do you hear me? Mother, I am asking you: do not leave the house.” She returned her phone to her bag, sighed, looked around to see whether there had been witnesses to this conversation, shook her head, and raised her eyes to the monitor.

“Hey, hey, look what's happening there!” Erez shouted, pointing at the Channel Two monitor. A policeman standing at the entrance to the tunnel was shouting into a megaphone. “Shimshi, I'm coming in alone, just me. Look at me.” In the background stood an older, bearded man peering from behind the trucks parked near the tunnel entrance. The Channel Two correspondent was broadcasting in a whisper, as if he were filling a few dead moments in a soccer game, since the strikers had just explained that they had nothing more to lose and if the police entered they would blow themselves up along with the labor minister, her driver, and her car. “To quote him precisely,” the correspondent reported, “strike leader Moshe Shimshi told police that if they enter the tunnel, ‘the only thing they'll find is dead bodies,' and, uh, just a minute,” he said, his voice rising. “It appears there are new developments.” Suddenly the studio interview on Channel One was interrupted, and Zohar appeared on the screen, shivering in a military parka, a scarf wrapped around his neck. He was standing at the entrance to the tunnel, pillars of black smoke in the background, and speaking into the microphone. “As you can see, the strikers are burning tires at the opening of the tunnel. They are demanding to meet with Danny Benizri, the Channel One correspondent, whom they wish to make their representative during negotiations. They are burning tires and threatening to blow themselves up. The life of the minister for labor and social affairs is still endangered.”

“What was that? What was that? What did he say?” Hefetz shouted, astonished. “What is it they want?”

“Exactly what you heard: they want Danny Benizri to represent them in negotiations with the government,” Erez said.

“I'm going down to the recording studio,” Hefetz said as he dashed out of the newsroom. Zadik opened his mouth to say something, but in the end merely followed suit after Hefetz.

 

Hefetz stood behind the control panel, looking into the studio through the large glass partition, Zadik at his side. Both saw the look of astonishment on Nehemia's face as the three men watched and listened to Zohar. “Did you hear what he said?” Nehemia called out to the partition. At the same instant Danny Benizri rose to his feet, quickly disconnected the microphone from his shirt collar, and stood at the doorway of the studio.

“Danny,” Nehemia said, alarmed, “where are you going?” Benizri did not respond as he removed his jacket from a hanger at the door to the studio. “Danny,” Nehemia called out to him, “you can't just pick up and leave in the middle of a broadcast!” On-screen the policeman with the megaphone was calling Shimshi. “Don't break contact with us. If we bring Benizri, will you let him come in?”

Danny Benizri left the studio and passed through to the control room.

“Where exactly do you think you're going?” Hefetz asked him, but—unbeknownst to Hefetz—Zadik had already confirmed it with a nod of his head and Dalit, the editor, had left her chair and was running after him with a monitor and lighting. “You're not going anywhere!” Hefetz bellowed, but Danny Benizri was already on his way out. Just then the phone rang with a request that Zadik return to his office, since the department heads were already waiting to begin their meeting with him.

At the entrance to his office, Rubin was waiting for him, an accusatory look on his face; Natasha stood behind him in the hallway as if she were his shadow. “No way,” Zadik said, “I don't have time now. You saw what's going on,” he said, scolding Rubin. “Matty,” he called to Matty Cohen, who had just entered the secretary's office.

Matty Cohen cast a look of misery at Aviva. “I didn't hear about Tirzah until now, when I came into the building and saw the death notices. I didn't know anything about it. Zadik, I've got to have a word with you—”

“Take a number,” Zadik said with a sigh. “I don't know what's with all you people today. We've got a meeting.”